Top Fishing News

2/10/12 Update: The original editorial by Mr. Ken Hastings was published here on 2/7/12. Below Mr. Hastings editorial is an editorial response from Maryland Fisheries Director Tom O'Connell dated 2/10/12. Mr. O'Connell requested that the response be published here and is being done with his full permission.

We start the week with guest columnist Ken Hastings.
In 2007, a bill to raise recreational fishing license fees was passed by the General Assembly but no one knows what happened to the money. DNR wanted more money to spend and recreational anglers looked like an easy touch. They weren’t going to complain about paying $10 more for a license to go with their $100,000 boat, trailer, tow vehicle, and fishing gear, especially if it would help improve the sport they loved. To keep the “accountability crowd” at bay, the bill had one of those “shall” (legalese for “not optional”) clauses requiring DNR to annually consult with the Sport Fisheries Advisory Commission on how to spend the revenues.

When the cost recovery train rolled into Annapolis, I realized that I had never witnessed any discussions on how to spend recreational revenues. I also discovered that MD law ...

I received a first hand report from Richard White, Jr. on the monster pending new Virginia State Record striped bass caught yesterday. Way to go guys, what a sick catch! Check this fishing report out,

"We went out with every report not sounding good. We were on the Bada Bing with Capt. Tim Cannon from Pungo and I was mating from Chesapeake.

My father and brother-n-law drove down Fri morning from Brentsville, VA. We had good markings of bait of off Cape Henry but the bite was very slow. We caught one dog shark and a couple of hours later we had a rod double down with dead weight pulling. There was not much of any head shaking going on and when Cary was about to wear out then we got color and he broke the surface and the head looked like he was going to ...

We start the week with guest writer Ken Hastings. About 15 years ago, Ken's love of everything outdoors became more focused on a quest for better natural resource management. Bank traps, blue crabs, oysters, yellow perch and striped bass have all dragged him into countless battles and what he describes as seemingly endless meetings where he saw an obsession with exploitation of our resources for profit and little or no interest in conserving anything for the future. While he sometimes join ranks with recreational fishing groups and shares his research with them, his public comments are his own.

When Ken retired from his electronics engineering career five years ago, he saw a lot more fishing in his future but it didn’t work out that way. Today, he can probably be best described as a full-time volunteer conservationist who occasionally goes fishing. Tomorrow, he told me he plans to start doing something about the “occasionally” part

Guessing at Striped Bass Abundance in Maryland. Not an Exact Science
In my simple mind, fisheries management relies on three basic data points:
1. How many fish there are.
2. How many fish will die.
3. How many fish will be left.

That’s it – everything else is derived from ...